How to best exploit sNICs to build disaggregated applications?
Apart from cost savings, network disaggregation and consolidation have unique benefits to both disaggregated and regular distributed applications, as an sNIC is a central point for its connected endpoints and an sNIC can be attached at both the sender and the receiver side.
We made an initial exploration along these directions with two case studies.
First, we build a key-value store on top of real disaggregated memory devices [1]} connected to an sNIC.
We explore using sNICs for traditional NTs like the transport layer and customized NTs like key-value data replication and caching.
Second, we build a Virtual Private Cloud application on top of regular servers by connecting sNICs at both the sender and the receiver side.
We disaggregate NTs like encapsulation/decapsulation, firewall, and encryption to the sNICs.
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